A grim anniversary for The Four Tops
Thirty-three years DETROIT — ago, the Four Tops’ Duke Fakir was homesick in a London hotel room, eager to get back to Detroit for Christmas week.
Fakir was also irritated. In a rare flash of anger for the cool, congenial Motown star, he and the Tops had just locked horns with an English TV producer who insisted they stay for one more day of taping.
The group resisted, even cursed him out. They had just taped one performance segment here in the studio, they argued — why not just do the second one now? They threatened to pull out of the program altogether.
To show their resolve, the Four Tops defiantly booked an evening flight: a Pan Am trip to Detroit with a stopover in New York. They called their wives to say they’d be heading home.
“We tried everything under the sun to get on that flight,” Fakir said. “We were so ready to get to Detroit.”
But the battle was ultimately won by the TV executive, a producer for the British hit show “Top of the Pops.” The group relented, grumbling all the way to their hotel.
And then an annoying day turned unsettling.
Fakir was in bed that night when his phone rang with the news: The London flight to Detroit, the one the Four Tops fought so hard to board, had exploded in midair over Scotland.
The Lockerbie bombing, as it came to be known, took 270 lives that evening of Dec. 21, 1988, killing everyone aboard along with 11 residents in the small Scottish town. Pan Am Flight 103 remains the deadliest terror attack in European history. Libya ultimately accepted responsibility for the act.
The Four Tops would later learn that the bomb, stowed in the cargo hold on the port side of the jetliner, was directly under the first-class seats they had purchased and left unused.
Fakir and his group mates Levi Stubbs, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton were shaken when they showed up at the studio to finish off their “Top of the Pops” duties. The two segments — one a performance of their classic “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” the other the new Tops single “Loco in Acapulco” — would air in coming weeks.
They finished the taping and immediately grabbed a British Airways flight back to the States, still rattled as they absorbed the reality of their close call with death.
After members collected their luggage at Detroit Metro Airport, Fakir addressed the group — his musical brothers, his friends since high school, the guys who had together scaled the heights of success. Now in their 50s, they’d been through so much together. And now this unnerving, surreal, miracle moment.
“I told them: There’s something else for us to do, much more for us to do,” Fakir recounts. “We all agreed there was something stronger than us, something above us, that kept us from getting on that flight.”
The experience, Fakir said, “put a real fine point on the fact that we were here for something we have no control over, and that we should use it to spread the love.”
That narrow escape from tragedy — and the ensuing renewal of that propelled the Tops as they moved forward — will be a pivotal moment in the forthcoming Four Tops stage musical, “I’ll Be There,” set to premiere next year in Detroit.
The musical is drawn from Fakir’s forthcoming memoir, due in May from Omnibus Books. The lifelong Detroiter said the book’s cover was recently completed and the first run is set to go into print.